Project Eternity - Interview @ PureSophistry

Is the development side of the game going to be that different from previous titles you’ve made?
Now that we’ve gone through the funding, what’s different is that we are publishing it. So that is going to be something a little new. On the development side a lot of us have been doing this for 20 years, but the one big change is ensuring fan involvement. Really invite people into the process, we are working on how we are going to do that right now, websites, webblogs and constant updates for the fans. On the publishing side, we have had a lot of contact in the publishing world but it is a little bit different , but we’re up for it.

Have there been any ideas from the nearly 75 thousand contributors that you’ve heard, or read that maybe you never considered for the vision of Project Eternity?
That’s a good question, whats interesting about RPG’s, the games are huge and broad and come from a rich pen and paper foundation, so I don’t want to say there’s no new ideas. But a lot of what we do is adapted on already proven methods. An example would be someone was saying in the comments section the other day, and I know this may sound dorky- but he said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if after I come back from a quest, instead of just selling off my stuff to a vendor I could invest my money into a store? Earning money that way?” It’s nothing something we ever considered and we are actually talking about and looking at if we can add that to the game.

Obsidian has these really robust features like perma-death and low intelligence characters are you considering bringing back that way to play?
Games have changed a little bit since then, it’s one of those thing where we have to think about what’s right for Project Eternity. Is it about the player playing someone who goes, “Ugh Urgh Ooh” while it was entertaining in Fallout, it still a conversation tier that made sense. In the end when it comes to the companions and perma death; RPG’s are all about options and choices, and even in choice in how you want to play this version of the game and that’s something Josh REALLY feels strongly about. Having features like that, that can be turned on.
Sometimes people think adding options to a change is just designer and game developers not making a choice (laughs) “we’ll just give a players a choice, makes it easy” that sorta thing! In the case, for an RPG I think that’s appropriate. When you go back to the DnD games, we made a choice in Icewind Dale to have Max Hitpoints on by default- a lot of times…because wizards would get killed in the first 7 minutes of the game. But for those who want a true DnD feeling they could turn it on.
So that’s how we look at it, with perma death you can have that experience. We also know the side effects of that though, usually when players turn on perma death all it does is force them to reload when someone dies. For the people who want to have that Ironman experience, we have you covered.